Finding pieces of the auld sod

The Road to McCarthy:

Around the World in Search of Ireland

Pete McCarthy

Fourth Estate: 384 pp., $25.95

*

From the start, Pete McCarthy has known well where Ireland is. He is the son of an Irish Catholic mother and an English Protestant father. He was raised in England but is intrigued by Irishness and by McCarthyhood -- that is, the condition of being named McCarthy, whether you’re a person or a town in Alaska.

The author’s eagerness to look all over for the auld sod, in odd corners of New York, Morocco, Tasmania, the Caribbean and beyond, is highly engaging, and it fuels this very funny book.

It’s the same sort of thinking that drove his last effort, “McCarthy’s Bar,” in which the governing impulse was this: “Never pass a bar that has your name on it.”

This time, the author is meeting members of the extended McCarthy clan around the world, reflecting on how and why so many are eager to claim Irish kinship and looking for laughs wherever he can find them. Frequently alcohol is at hand.

On his adoption by a local near the waterfront in Cobh, Ireland: “He had clearly decided I needed a tour guide, and to be fair he did have an impassioned, unpredictable quality not normally found in official guides, but then they haven’t usually been drinking all day, more’s the pity.”

On a Chinese restaurant’s menu in Tangier: “I know that Chinese restaurants like to adapt their cuisine to local tastes and ingredients, but occasionally I get the feeling that something far more disturbing is going on.”

“The Road to McCarthy” is easy fun. And whether the author intends it as such, it’s also part of an inevitable new generation in travel writing. As globalism creeps and traditions mix, adventurers have ever fewer pockets of pure culture, or pure nature, to hunt for. So they look at cultures in collision, entwinement, abrasion and dispersal.

Sometimes the strain shows as McCarthy reaches for gags, and most Americans will scratch their heads at the occasional obscure British expression or invocations of European pop figures such as Greek singer Demis Roussos. But before long, McCarthy is likely to change speeds and deliver a passage like his touching quotation of a plaintive letter from an Irish wife to her husband at sea, a long-lost note he came across in Cobh, the northern city that served as a principal port of departure for much of the 19th century. And then we’re back to the laughs.

On approaching a customs official back in the U.S.: “I always feel guilty entering America, on account of having worked for two days as a chef without a permit, and without any of the skills normally associated with being a chef, in Flagstaff, Arizona, in the 1970s. I explained my accent by saying I was from Massachusetts, and it seemed to do the trick.”

*

A Way to See

the World

From Texas to Transylvania With a Maverick Traveler

Thomas Swick

Lyons Press: 388 pp., $24.95

*

If ever you’ve wondered just how strange the life of a newspaper travel writer might be, the 28-page introduction here is the best account I’ve seen. Thomas Swick, travel editor since 1989 for Florida’s Sun-Sentinel (a Fort Lauderdale-based newspaper that shares a parent company with The Times), combines honest wonder at the world, learned perspective and a healthy skepticism. Along the way, he suggests that South Florida “takes itself seriously even though nobody else does. It is the perfect place for a travel editor.”

Here he is, finding himself cornered in Konya, Turkey, by a carpet vendor who has lured him with an invitation to tea: “His sad brown eyes widened imploringly. I suddenly understood how a woman who comes up after a date wanting only coffee feels. In Mehmet’s mind I had entered into the game and was now refusing to play by the rules. I was just another foreign tease, a carpet virgin.”

*

Rick Steves’

Europe Through the

Back Door 2004

The Travel Skills Handbook

Rick Steves

Avalon Travel Publishing: 576 pp., $21.95 paper

*

Rick STEVES has been doing this for 25 years, barnstorming through Europe, writing books, giving talks, making television shows. Behind his name operates a 60-person staff in Edmonds, Wash. This new edition of his introduction to Europe is part manifesto and part guidebook. His creeds are hard to argue with: “Globe-trotting destroys ethnocentricity,” and “Our Earth is home to 6 billion equally important people.”

The first 340 pages here are broad suggestions on language, driving, photography and other subjects, followed by introductions to 38 “back doors” across the Continent, from the hill towns of Umbria to Blackpool, “Britain’s Coney Island.” As Steves acknowledges, “Publicizing them gnaws at what makes them so great. But what kind of travel writer can keep his favorite discoveries under wraps.... I keep no secrets.”

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